Hi all
I found this amazing board: https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005007081128582.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2deu
But here is the big question: Can one trust it to last?
And is the firmware okay? I would like to use it with 8 drives and replace my physically failing qnap system.
Alternatively I could migrate to two systems with 4 disks each, but I would like to keep the maintenance to a minimum.
Thanks for any pointers
If you can give without any kind of aftermarket support then probably. I wouldnāt count on any security and/or AGESA updates, bug fixing in general etc. Reliability might also be a concern.
You wonāt get any UEFI updates or updates at all. They send you the product and thatās it. You need to be aware of that. If you are going to use it in your internal network only without access form the internet, it should be fine.
I had a Topton product once and it worked, all the settings in UEFI I needed worked and the product did not seem to have any manufacturing faults. The manufacturing looked pretty decent to be honest, since my guess is that those are aftermarket products coming from the same factories that build mainboards and computers for western companies.
Bios updates for Topton boards like the one in the video. Donāt update unless you have a good reason to though just in case It Goes Sideways
@wendell
With your latest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeYRsVmYJjs), would you happen to know what is the maximum amount of RAM that the board supports?
Your help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
running with 96gb @ 5600 just fine right now.
Iām always tempted by these boards because of the cool layout and the stuff you could do with (like forbidden router kind of stuff), but I always end up chickening out because I canāt bring myself to trust the firmware in them. Do you think itās ok to run VMs on this without worrying about that? I mean, if I run pfSense inside a VM on one of these any potential malware would be contained to the host OS, right?
Thanks for the video by the way.
no sir
Ring 0 attacks are specifically below the OS and persistent.
What you are looking for is NDAA/TAA compliant hardware if youāre stateside.
Would you be able to run the proxmox backup benchmark on this system. Im interested in the cpu performance reguarding the tls performance. Thinking about a small 4 drive system to replicate my current pbs system to. It would become small enough to cary to the DC should I ever need to restore local.
Thanks
I have been looking at the unique boards on aliexpress also.
Topton N17 ITX motherboard Zen 4 and Zen 3+ options (Ryzen 9 7940HS /Ryzen 7 7840HS/ Ryzen 9 6900HX) $290-$380 https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807136457656.html
Bare NUC motherboard Zen 3+ (6600H / 7535U / 7735U)
$180-$230 https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807212304661.html
Ultra thin Ryzen mini itx motherboard, all-in-one industrial control NAS
( 5825U / 5800u / 5600u) this has a lot of Modularity / adapter dongles.
($236-$272) https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805659712814.html
Powerful NAS Motherboard 82.5G i226 Intel i7-8705G Discrete Graphics AMD Radeon RX Vega M 4GB 2DDR4 17x17 ITX Firewall Router
($289 ) An odd parts bin special I guess, I find it odd and neat.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806245017937.html
Qotom Motherboard with 10G SFP+/2.5G SFP C3338R 3558R C3758 C3758R CPU Onboard ($188-$288) https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806076061727.html
Topton Engineering sample cpu minipc ($224-$373)
( 6900HX ES / 6800H ES / 7940HS ES 6600H ES)
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806628556327.html
Long lurker and YT sub, but I rarely post. I saw the video on this board and decided to checkout this thread.
While I donāt have this board per se, I do have one of the Topton mini PCās that I have been running for close to 2 years now as a home server with Proxmox.
I picked this up in 2022 with the 5825U CPU, itās configured with 32gb ram and enough storage for several VMās.
PfSense, Pi-Hole, Home Assistant and a VM for running all my docker containers.
So far, I canāt really fault it other than the less than stellar cooling solution.
Did you see this particular comment on your Chinese Topton video? Iām interested if you also have the same problems with your board as the commenters.
so far been solid knock on wood
I would be very interested in this board as a possible low power unraid/jellyfin box.
The only thing I canāt find out (As I have never had the chance to experiment with it)
Does anyone know if I could bifurcate the PCI-e slot from the GEN3 1X8 to GEN3 2X4 with some sort of daughter board as I would love to run both a Mellanox ConnectX-3 for 10G SFP+ support and an Intel Arc A310 ECO for transcoding.
Edit: I mean if the motherboard/CPU/bios combo supports it natively i would give a breakout board like this a go: PCIEX16E-Q4S | PCIe x16 edge connector to four PCIe x4 slots riser cable | x16 to x4 PCIe bifuration riser cable | PCIEX16E-Q4S but if not i have never played with PCIe switches
And hopefully there is no limitation on using all the M.2/PCIe/SATA connections at the same time as I have had on some boards (I shall need to read up if the bifurcation option is available
Any idea where I could get one of those heat spreaders for AMD platforms thatās on these boards? I think the socket is FP6. Currently Iāve just slapped huge heatsink on the stock heat plate of my mini pc but itās not optimal.
This is what you get in general, poor QA and good luck getting firmware updates.
Hi, Iām the second commenter from that screenshot from youtube. Iāve registered to post here because I did eventually resolve the problem by replacing an m.2 SSD and the board really is exactly what I was looking for. Itās a lesson for me to do more testing before installing components into a case because it was really annoying to rip bits out to try to isolate the issue in a mini itx case.
After removing the top m.2 SSD, the permanent beep tone after rebooting stopped happening. When I replaced that SSD (a silicon power US75) with a different one (a samsung evo 970), it all still worked. I still think thereās a bios bug there because that US75 is working fine now in my desktop. I should also note that I had and continue to have the bottom m.2 slot filled with another US75 which is working fine.
@wendell Wohoo, good to know. Thanks again for such a uncomplicated way to ask you detailed questions here in the forum and holy smokes your answering speed is mindbogling - i get the impression that you have a very busy life.
P.S: Do you maybe have the idle powers of this whole board from your testing?
@burgundy ow wow, i never exprected your reply here - but im so grateful for it. Thank vou for the super helpful followup, this clears my bad stomach feeling regarding this mainboard. Clearly the mainboard should not show this behaviour with one particular ssd, but this makes somehow more sense to me from a statistical point. the chinese firmware developer will probably not test a whole lot different nvme ssds to confirm compatibility. If there would be problems regarding core functions of the firmware aka re-initialization of the whole mainboard/cpu after reboot then i would not see the firmware developers fit to build any bios firmware in the right way.
Nice. Now i can plan on using this mainboard in my next nas version.
thanks again everyone 
Just re asking as there are now more people following the page 
Is anyone aware if this device would support PCIe bifurcation out of the box?
Final update for the problem I posted about. I bought a SanDisk SDSSDX3N-2T00-G26 to replace the second Silicon Power SP02KGBP44US7505 that was triggering the problem, and those two are working together with the SanDisk in the top slot and the SP in the bottom slot.
@myworkone Sorry, I donāt have the hardware to test for it. I can tell you that I couldnāt see any option for it in the BIOS though.
